XDA

Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Friday, April 30, 2010

The Quiet Sun

There is nearly no correlation between, in this order, increased CO2 concentration and world temperature rise. In the opposite order there is very good correlation--the world's average temperature rises and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases. There is, however, a remarkable correlation between sun spots and world average temperature. So many of us who care about the real source of climate change follow the sunspot numbers. Here's the straight dope from SpaceWeather.com,

Last year, 260 days were without sun spots (71 %). This year only 21 days (17%) have had no visible sun spots. Most of them were recently, nearly two weeks worth, and the thing that broke the chain, was a micro tiny sun spot yesterday which barely lasted 15 hours. The normal "resting time" between peaks of sun spot activity, the solar minimum period, is 485 days. Our minimum has lasted 791 days.

The 10 cm radio flux density from the sun is now 75. This flux density number ranges between 64 and 267; so the lower range fits the inactivity of very recently. It had peaked in the low 90s just a few months ago.

So, are we in a Maunder like minimum which will lead to big temperature drops as with the Little Ice Age beginning in the 1600s? Unlikely. What we may well see is a very short lived minimum, like the Dalton minimum, which resulted in the Russian winter which doomed Napoleon and the Grand Armee. But the sun could become very active very quickly.

The magnitude of solar magnetism, which results in sun spots, has been decreasing lately. If it declines below 1500 gauss, the solar scientists say there will be no sun spots. That could be bad.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Thought of the Day

As a Leftist rule of thumb — once again rendering intellectual debate unnecessary and impossible — white is wrong or bad, and non-white is right and good; male is wrong and bad, and female is right and good; and the rich are wrong and bad, and the poor right and good. For the record, there is one additional division on the Left — strong and weak — to which the same rule applies: The strong are wrong and bad, and the weak are right and good. That is a major reason for Leftist support of the Palestinians (weak) against the Israelis (strong), for example.

This is why, to cite another example, men are dismissed when they oppose abortion. The idea is far less significant than the sex of the advocate. As for women who oppose abortion on demand, they are either not authentically female or simply traitors to their sex. Just as the Left depicts blacks who oppose race-based affirmative action as not authentic blacks or are traitors to their race.

In this morally inverted world, the virtual absence of blacks from tea party rallies cannot possibly reflect anything negative on the black and minority absence, only on the white tea partiers.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Second Thought of the Day

The point is, unlike conventional air pollution, which was reduced without any constraint on fuel use, the CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced only by the use of massively less coal, oil, and natural gas. But even if the case for catastrophic global warming weren’t in free fall, the energy ambitions of the climate campaign remain so extreme as to make King Canute blush. The target the climate campaigners have set for the United States—an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by the year 2050—would require replacing virtually our entire fossil fuel energy infrastructure. Substituting natural gas for coal would deliver only about a 15 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, and even if we replaced every coal plant with a carbon-free nuclear plant, we’d still be less than halfway to the policy target. For the United States, the 80 percent reduction target means reducing our fossil fuel use to a level the nation last experienced in 1910. But since our population in 2050 will be nearly five times larger than the population of 1910, on a per capita basis we’re talking about going back to the fossil fuel use of about 1875. This is patently absurd.

Thought of the Day

Actually, Democrats are reduced to warning that certain attitudes can lead to violence because there hasn’t been any actual violence at the tea-party rallies. All have been remarkably orderly and even friendly. You can almost feel the Democrats’ frustration at this.

By contrast, many, many left-wing protests and demonstrations have sparked violence. Just last year, at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, rampaging protesters broke shop windows and scuffled with police, who used batons and tear gas to subdue them. A 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle was so badly disrupted by anti-globalization fanatics who smashed windows and shut down the center of the city that the governor had to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard. (President Clinton failed to assail those who criticize corporations as inspiring the violence.)

Monday, April 19, 2010

Completing the Circle

A few years ago, maybe less, the second worst American President of the last 50 years voiced the already existing Democratic opinion that Israel practiced apartheidvis a vis the Arabs who lived in Israel and in the area captured in the 1967 war from the Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan. I doubt that characterization a lot. The Arab citizens of Israel have identical civil rights--with the exception of mandatory service in the IDF-- with Jewish citizens (of the Jewish state of Israel). The people in former Jordan are not citizens of Israel, so of course they have different (less) civil rights than citizens do. It is an absurd calumny to accuse Israel of apartheid.

But let's complete the circle. If the Democrats look to a former political practice of the Union of South Africa to describe what they mis-perceive as the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, where should we look for a nation whose former practice was most like the modern Palestinian political demands, namely, that the West Bank (and indeed the whole of Israel) must be Judenrein and, even better, all the Jews should be destroyed? Well, wouldn't the obvious choice be Nazi Germany? (Sorry to fulfill Godwin's Law). Of course that is the logical choice.

Here's another. The prevailing misinformation is that while, yes, the Democrats indeed were the party of Slavery (at least, after 1820, the Southern Democrats were) and yes, the perfidious 'Jim Crow' laws after the Civil War were passed in the South and Mid-West by Democrats, and yes, perhaps all or almost all of the members of the KKK during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th Century were Democrats, but, the misinformed lefty of today says-- it was the Northern Democrats who spearheaded the Civil Rights Movement and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, inter alia, all the racists in the Democrat party became Republicans and it is that party which is the locus of modern racism in America. Well, except for the Tea Party.

Let's complete the circle. The Republican Party was abolitionist from its inception and freeing the slaves was its raison d'etra. After the success of the North in the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments by Republicans, which amendments indeed freed the slaves and gave them equal civil rights (on paper), the racist Democrats continued to hate the Republicans and thought of them perpetually as n-word lovers. They were. There were, in fact, very few white southern Republicans (my family excepted) and nearly all the blacks who joined a political party after emancipation joined the Republicans, for almost a full Century. So those ignorant citizens today, who believe the racist Democrats magically became racist Republicans after 1964, and talk about 'code' and the Southern Strategy, they must actually believe that racist Southern Democrats who opposed equal civil rights for blacks decided that the best and most hospitable political place to keep on being a racist was with the party that historically had the most black members and whose white members, they firmly believed, were all n-word loving jerks who venerated Lincoln for freeing the slaves and saving the Union.

Now, really, how likely was that?

The Southern Strategy was really to woo the big government hating, traditional value loving Democrats (only some of whom were racist) into the party where hating an ever bigger government and loving traditional values (Guns, God, Law and Order, etc.) had a natural home. You could look it up, if you doubt me.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Thought of the Day

By the way, that's another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It's not that Britain has nukes, and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It's that the machete crowd are willing to kill on an industrial scale, and the high-tech guys can't figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative.

Only two nations I know of have voluntarily scrapped their nuke weapons programs, South Africa and Libya. Allowing Iran to get nuke weapons is a second Holocaust, it's flipping the bird to "never again" again. Of course, to President Obama, and his party in general, whose antipathy towards Israel is palpable, a nuke weapon vaporizing downtown Tel Aviv will be sad but ultimately no big deal. However, for those of us who support and even love Israel (mostly on the right, with the liberal Jewish majority a mystery exception to that truth) it is a crime no less evil than the industrial scale murder of the Jews and Gypsies, und so weiter, during the second half of WWII, but with much clearer proof of accessory before the fact charges.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Little Feat,Bonnie Raitt- Dixie Chicken

Good News and Bad News for Colorado Gun Rights

First the good news: A panel of the Colorado Court of Appeals (Taubman Sternberg and Hawthorne, the author ) has declared that the CU ban (and the very recent CSU ban as well, by implication) on people, with concealed carry permits, having weapons on a University campus goes against the statutory intent of the concealed carry statute (wherein the ability to carry applies everywhere unless specifically excepted in the statute--and it only mentions elementary, junior high and high schools). The bad news is that the court seems to have muffed the constitutional challenge.

In Colorado a law that does not impinge on a fundamental right gets 'rational basis' review. That is, if the person attacking the law as unconstitutional can't show beyond a reasonable doubt that there is no rational basis for the government to enact the law, it's constitutional. That's a very difficult burden and I doubt the number of successful constitutional challenges to such statutes exceed the number of digits of one human hand. On the other hand, if the statute impinges on a fundamental right, the law gets strict scrutiny, and then the government has to show that the law serves a compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn so that no other rational alternative can effect that compelling state interest. This is a difficult burden for the state to carry and usually laws are struck down under strict scrutiny. These two different rules of review are virtually the opposite ends of the entire spectrum of review.

So what did this Court do? The judges crafted a middle ground (based on the execrable Robertson case (dealing with the Denver assault weapon ban)), which middle ground review was called rational exercise. This is the dumb way to go. What idiot (besides the four liberal Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court) doesn't think the right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights is a fundamental right?

I guess we'll find out. I wonder if the coming ruling (5-4) of the U.S. Supremes in the Chicago gun case, finding that the 2nd Amendment is indeed a fundamental right, will have any effect on our Supreme Court's decision here ( if CU-D is dumb enough to appeal this).

The Power of Faith in Science

Here is a quote from a story in the Guardian about Warmie true believers. Can you spot the key word in the quote?

Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, climate scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, say that only about half of the heat believed to have built up in the Earth in recent years can be accounted for. New instruments are needed to locate and monitor this missing heat, they say, which could be storing up trouble for the future.

'The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,' Trenberth said. 'The reprieve we've had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.'

The key word is 'believe.' Why do scientists believe there is heat, when the instruments they use to measure temperature (on satellites no less) say it isn't there? Isn't that anti-science?

When the scientific types develop a theory (or thesis) and the observations don't support it, the obvious thing to do is doubt the thesis. These guys doubt the measurements. Good science? You make the call.

I take issue with the statement that ocean surface temperatures have risen in the past few decades. They used to measure sea surface temperature with a bucket over the side of a boat and a thermometer. Any warming bias in that method? Now (since 2003) we have three thousand plus floating, reporting buoys which can take the temperature of the oceans, from the surface to 6,500 meters down. What has that system of buoys shown?

Well, it depends on whom you ask. Josh Willis, who is the go to guy regarding the analysis of the buoys data used to say that the system showed ocean cooling, but he has developed since a computer program which has corrected that result and shows warming now. See the results here. Other guys have analyzed the data and come to a different conclusion. See here. This coverage of the same story seems to show that the latest Argo readings are not helpful to the Warmies.

UPDATE: Roger Pielke, Sr. asks, here, the logical question to the Warmie assertion that the lost heat must be deep in the ocean. If the lost joules necessarily have to come from the surface (where the sun's rays hit and warm the water), and we have been actively monitoring the top 6,500 feet of the ocean for years, how did they sneak past us undetected? Trenberth doesn't seem to have much of an answer or rather he says the new instruments are needed to detect the heat sneaking to the depths of the ocean. Cue Michael McDonald.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Thought of the Day

These days, feminism isn’t a movement at all, really, but a collection of blogs obsessed with the pop culture it claims to be victimized by, a forum for women who promote themselves as victims of a patriarchy that no longer exists, a pretend movement that contains within it no forward movement at all, only a fetal-like desire to curl up on itself, muttering Women’s Studies jargon, and handing out trigger warnings like party favors at a girl’s-only slumber party.

Monday, April 12, 2010

The Cold Facts on Catlin

Last year the Catlin team of earnest but inept Warmie true believer Polar Adventurers were dropped off on the Arctic ice about 930 Km from the pole and, I truly believe, they thought they had a fair chance of walking over the ice to the pole. They didn't even get close. This time they were dropped off only about 580 Km from the pole. They report their present position as 86.44 N which means they have 3 and two thirds degrees of longitude yet to travel, which is just under 410 Km. They make 10 klicks on a good day, so just 40 days left to travel to reach the pole. They were picked up last year on May 14, 2009, so they probably don't have 40 days left to travel this year.

Why not just be dropped on the North Pole itself and let them walk out south as far as they can?

Orion

The Orion Nebula (M42), surrounding the central star cluster in the 'sword,' in a false color image from a malfunctioning infrared camera in the Spitzer Space Telescope (which is out of coolant). Very nice.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

False Flag Operations

I didn't really want to talk about these, certainly not in the abstract, as that discussion makes you sound like a paranoid crazy person of the 9/11 Truther type. However, a few recent events has made an exegesis of a few concrete examples appealing.

First a definition and a few historical examples--False flag operations are when you pretend to be the other side and do things ostensibly bad for your side but which will put the other side in a bad light and allow you to do what you want in reaction. The Japanese, in 1931, blew up a section of railroad, blamed it on Manchurians and then invaded Manchuria to punish the saboteurs (the Marco Polo Bridge incident was similar). In 1939, Nazis, under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, pretended to be Polish invaders of Germany to justify Germany's invasion of Poland. The Soviets shelled the Russian village of Mainila on the Finnish border to justify the Soviet invasion of Finland at the start of the Winter War. I'm aware all of these are from the 30s, are all admitted, and were all perpetrated by regimes we generally think of as evil. Again, I'm trying to steer clear of paranoid delusions.

What are the recent, and much milder, ones? After passage of the Health Care reform disaster, there was, it seemed, a media decision to highlight violent reaction one would naturally attribute to the right. Immediately called to mind are rocks thrownthrough windows of Democrats. There were reports of several of these (including one on the 30th floor of a skyscraper--sign that rock thrower up for the Rockie's rotation). But hold on there, kitty cat; we here in Denver know that the busted windows of Democratic HQ at 8th and Santa Fe a few months ago was the result of Lefty property damage because the gendertroubled window breaker got caught in the act (at least one of the window breaking team was caught). Had Denvers Finest not been lucky enough to be there when the glass started shattering, we all would have thought the vandalism was from the right. Indeed, one of the top state Democrats, Pat Waak, said it was right wing violence even after the political affiliation of the perpetrator was clear. How many of the other Democrats' windows broken recently were self-inflicted? Impossible to know the answer to that, but, just so, it is impossible to dismiss the possibility based on the above cited local history.

How to tell then where the tea party really stands, and who stands with them?

Just go and observe. Be your own news gatherer. See how racist, offensive, violent and radical these citizens are (how little they are in each category, that is). Such inspection, I believe, will show the media to be not only biased but corrupt; it will show those who support the tea party what they already knew and it will open the eyes of those who judge the majority of the media as reliable.

Friday, April 09, 2010

Thought of the Day

But most of the diversity-peddling faculty are old enough to have some residual acquaintanceship with the inheritance they affect to revile. Whatever bollocks they spout in class, they have no wish to live anywhere other than an advanced Western society: for one thing, it’s the only place you can make a living selling fatuous pap about diversity; in that and many other ways, multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon. In some deep unacknowledged sense, they understand they’re engaged in a pantomime.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Thought of the Day

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn't, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He's either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he's a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. (By contrast, see my post yesterday for how easy it is to get it on tape when real epithets are flying.)

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points - in the same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a boundary dispute.

But that's what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they're not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn't that what societies with functioning media used to call "a story"?

Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it - and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.